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Category: Disney Comic

If you’re a TV Tropes regular, you’ve probably seen this panel before:

You can find if, of course, in the page for the As You Know trope: the one where character A explains to character B, in detail, something that character B already knows — sometimes even beginning with the words “as you know” — as exposition for the reader / viewer. The above panel, however, is also a perfect example of another trope: Lampshade Hanging, where the characters acknowledge the presence of a trope; by doing so (“this is like a bad horror movie!”, the character says…), the reader / viewer usually tends to “forgive” the author for the use of an unrealistic trope, even if just unconsciously.

Get it? The “joke” here is that their conversation is totally unrealistic; people don’t talk about things they both know perfectly well with all those expository details, almost as if expecting the other not to know what they’re talking about. Instead, the conversation is solely for the benefit of the reader… and the author even acknowledges (or “lampshades”) that in the caption box!

Of course, any real Marvel fan would need no introduction to those two: he or she’d instantly recognize Daimon Hellstrom, the son of Satan a-demon-who-used-to-be-Satan-but-was-changed-to-a-pretender-so-as-not-to-offend-the-religious-crazies, and Patsy Walker, formerly from Marvel’s 1940s romance comics, and later a superheroine in her own right. But I digress…